Conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow (global)

This is a notice that either today or tomorrow, I intend to start a conversion of *all* LiquidThread talk pages to Flow boards. LiquidThreads is a now unmaintained extension with all support being dropped by anyone who worked on the original versions of the extension (inc. the never fully released version 3). This was kept on Miraheze solely for the purpose of supporting the needs of AllTheTropes wiki with all new requests by other wikis being declined for technical reasons.

A conversion never happened for two reasons:

An official conversion script wasn't released when Orain died,

There were database integrity issues resulting is misattribution of edits (in the awkward way LQT stores author names).

Since the creation and import to Miraheze, an official script was released and over the past few weeks I've been putting special pressure and work into resolving the database integrity issues. As work carries on for general edits and logging (potentially by Southparkfan), the LQT tables were handled by Vorticity.

A comment about the 1.26 upgrade

The MediaWiki 1.26 upgrade that was performed today has succeeded, but it took another hour longer for All The Tropes than expected (there already was a scheduled maintenance window of two hours, but ATT was read-only for three hours instead).

I'm sorry for that. When running update.php (that's a script we use for updating the database so it will work with extension/MediaWiki changes), I noticed it (likely, I couldn't find out whether it did or not) ran populateLogUsertext.php (that 'fixes' username log entries in Special:Log). Running populateLogUsertext.php could have a more or less catastrophic effect to Special:Log entries that were made before the move to Miraheze, with as result completely inaccurate log entries that could have been unrecoverable.

Since I didn't want to take any risk, I decided to restore a part of the backup we made just before updating MediaWiki. I know it's a pity the wiki was read-only for another hour, but I hope you understand why I chose for it.

Recent downtime

Hello, as most of you might have experienced, All The Tropes (well Orain) has barely been accessible for over the past few days. Our loadbalancer (prod10) which spreads the traffic among the three MediaWiki servers we have, stopped serving users who do not use IPv6. The cause is unknown, but we suspect a DDoS (around the time prod10 started to have issues, an inbound DDoS (or something similiar) hit prod10). We suspect that DigitalOcean after that cut off prod10, which resulted into downtime. FastLizard4 (one of the sysadmins) and me discussed how to get Orain back up, and after a while, All The Tropes was brought back online at ~07:00 AM (UTC+0) today, and all Orain wikis were confirmed online at ~10:45 AM (UTC+0) today.

Some of the current traffic is still routed through prod10, I don't know why, but since no one told me they still are having issues with accessing Orain, I won't really look into that. I'll keep you updated as necessary. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for the patience. A report is available on Meta.

Orain unexpectedly still had nullrouting (by DigitalOcean) issues, because we are still under fire of DDoS attacks. Since today the situation has more or less stabilized very much compared to the last three days, and with some very hard work we've fixed most of the issues affecting the public.

I don't expect any major interruptions again, but I can't guarantee that. We will keep you updated as necessary.

I am sorry for what happened these last few days, but we try to do what we can.

Most sites just get Cloudflare for it. People say it's cheap. There's different https://www.cloudflare.com/plans but most people sound like they are either getting the $20/month plan or even the free plan. Cloudflare says the free plan has "Basic DDoS protection". I personally suspect people just get the free plan. In fact, I've seen cheap, rarely visited websites with it and I'm certain they're on the free plan because hosting for those sites is really cheap with so little traffic. The only thing with Cloudflare is there's different control panel settings and sometimes people leave it on setting so all visitors from Tor and proxies have to enter a CAPTCHA before viewing each page.

File caching

In order to improve the performance on All The Tropes I've enabled file caching here. The first visitor of a page will trigger a function in MediaWiki which not only renders the HTML page, but saves it to a hard disk too (a place which gets mounted on all MediaWiki servers - so all MediaWiki servers share the same cache) as an HTML. When a user requests the Orain servers to render a page, it just will send the content of the HTML file. This should lead into noticeable performance improvements.

I'm not sure if it works, but the cache can be purged like this, and on each 3rd hour of the day, a script will be rebuilding the full cache. While I don't expect any (major) issues, please do not hesitate to contact me if you encounter any problems, and you suspect that those are caused by the new file caching feature. Regards, Southparkfan (Orain sysadmin)

We now have the search engine redirect to Google's search results

Since the in house search engine is broken and the cost of the resources we would need for purely in house search is very prohibitive, our search engine uses Google's search results, which, while not the most updated, definitely is better than nothing and has no timeout problems.

If a pure in house solution becomes feasible, we will move to that.

Also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but the WikiEditor smiley insert gadget has been removed and disabled due to ongoing issues, plan to replace this with a more stable extension in the future.

Happy belated Christmas everyone

Here's some gifts to make your next year of troping even more wonderful:

Recent Changes Log Filter - For everyone annoyed when spammers try to register in drove and their user creation stuff clogs up recent changes, this add an option to RC to hide all user creation logs to keep things somewhat cleaner in RC.

PageTriage - Your new and improved New Page Patrol (check the link of the same name on the sidebar). Allows anyone to see all new pages in the main and user namespaces, great for sussing out spam or new pages that need help. Somewhat Wikipedia specific (the help pages point to theirs), but the filters will work just fine for ATT in figuring out what new pages need attention.

EmbedVideo - Due to issues reported with the Widgets Youtube embedding, this is an alternative video embedding extension, with support for over twenty different video services. Check the page for the extension for better instructions.

MultiUpload - This extension allows for the uploading of multiple files at once, perfect for speeding up uploading tasks.

Please report any issues with these extensions (not already mentioned on the extension pages) to the Tech Wishlists and Bug Reports forum.

Well YouTube works just fine, but DailyMotion embedding still doesn't seem to work. Honestly, if it's at all possible, I would rather use DailyMotion to upload videos for All The Tropes, since YouTube is much more capricious in its takedowns.

We now have Media Viewer and the Collection extension for making books!

Media Viewer is an opt in Beta Feature (enable it in the beta tab of your preferences) that allows for seeing thumbnailed images in full view via a lightbox without leaving the page.

Collection is an extension for making a collection of pages for printing or rendering into PDF format. Perfect for on the go reading in paper format or via a mobile device. Check the Print/Export section of the sidebar to use this feature.

Don't use the "Download As PDF" option, this seems to have issues. The "Create a Book" feature is fine. It will start on a random page, but you can add whatever pages you want for your book, and help documentation for this has been imported for further instructions.

Some stuff have low obvious usefulness, while having obvious misuses. Such as pointlessly enthusiastic sticking it everywhere just because it's available (which is what Questionable Sanity seems to be doing now, but it's a fairly common problem).

(answered to wrong thread the first time - my bad)
> I agree Youtube embeds should not completely replace all illustrations, but if it does a better job of illustrating a trope, I don't see the issue.

It cannot do a better - or even equal - job of illustrating a page. Because an embedded video must have either:

Preview picture which on its own would be good as a static pic. Since it also got overlay with controls glued on top and borders around, it's not as good nor as compact as a static pic with link (the user have to click on either) would be.

Autostart (gah!).

In addition, it may be of the wrong size either for page layout or for playing, which aren't always the same - and when not, it's a no-win Morton's Fork. Not necessarily, but since YouTube provides different resolutions, this pitfall will be open more often than not.

Also, even the preview pic is visible at all only if the user loads YouTube automatically without question. Which practically means: "turn Google tracking on, or don't have illustrations on this wiki". Is this the desirable result?

Hmm, excellent points. If the trope in question could illustrated just as well with an animated gif (preferably below 512KB in size) or a static image, that is preferred. As a compromise, all videos that are not entirely unsuitable and are still relevant can be moved to the Image Links page. However, if the linked video is agreed by consensus to illustrate the page the best, it stays.

If need be, discuss these items on the discussion pages or page image forum if you feel they need replaced, and I'll be happy to review the arguments of all sides in the event of a dispute, and a decision will be made on consensus of all parties involved.

We have an actual smiley toolbar and rules on linking audio/video files.

Smiley Emoticons - You can now add actual smiley emoticons to talk threads and forum posts (may take awhile for this option to show up due to caching for some), you should see a smiley face on the Advanced section of the WikiEditor you can click on to see some insertable emoticons. We have this feature thanks to the hard work of Perhelion.

If direct links are made to audio/video files, they can be played in the browser as audio/visual examples of tropes. Please label all links appropriately for those who don't wish to be forced to autoplay them.